MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court on Friday said the recently amended Information Technology (IT) Rules against fake content on social media against the government may be excessive, quipping that one cannot bring a hammer to kill an ant.
A Division Bench of Justices Gautam Patel and Neela Gokhale also said it still did not understand the need behind the amendment to the Rules and stated it finds it difficult that one authority of the government is given absolute power to decide what is fake, false, and misleading.
In a democratic process, the court said, the government is as much a participant as a citizen is and hence a citizen has the fundamental right to question and demand answers and the government is duty-bound to respond. The Bench was hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the amended IT Rules. Stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra, the Editors Guild of India and the Association of Indian Magazines have filed petitions in the HC against the Rules, terming them arbitrary and unconstitutional.
The court also questioned who will fact-check the Fact Checking Unit (FCU) that is to be set up under the amended Rules. “There is an assumption that what the FCU says is undeniably the ultimate truth,” Justice Patel said.
The Bench noted that offline content has some filtration but there is no such fact-checking for social media intermediaries as of now.
“There should be some fact checking. At some level, someone must do fact checking of content on social media. But you (petitioners) may be right to say that this (Rules) are excessive. You cannot bring a hammer to kill an ant,” the court said.
The Bench said no person is claiming a fundamental right to lie and all that a citizen is saying is that they have a right to defend the correctness of their statement. The Bench said on the Internet everything and everyone is a date and binary and a person can be anything they want and this was not necessarily impersonation.